It Ain't The Speakers |-/ JOSHLER

11.1: i døn't wanna be heard

🌿 JØSH'S PØV 🌿

I was awoken by the sound of forty chairs being dragged across the floor, and my eyes flew open.

"Thank you Mr Stump," everyone chorused. I immediately shot up from my seat and bowed with the rest, knocking over half of the things on my table in the process.

"I saw that," Tyler laughed and I rolled my eyes. Thank goodness math was the last lesson.

We got onto our bike at the school gate and set off. Yeah, it was pretty much "ours" now that he comes over to my place almost every other day after school. But not today, I had something to show him.

Around the corner as usual, along the main road, but this time I rode past where we lived. Passing by two streets, I slowed down and turned into the fourth one. Tracey Street.

I must admit, the houses to our sides here were older and dull, somewhat creepy even, not the kind of place a bored teenager would explore on weekends. But I wasn't the average teenager. What would anyone expect from me? Going against the norm was fun, a hobby, a lifestyle.

I felt Tyler grip tighter as he attempted to look over my shoulders to see where we were heading. "We're halfway there," I assured him. From my own past experiences, the end of the street is always the most interesting, and this couldn't be more true right now.

Parking my bike beside a tree, we both gazed into the depths of the forest in front of us.

Tyler looked up at me, worried. "In there..?"

"You'll love it, I promise."

He tried to smile, stepping forward into the soft grass. It wasn't a very dense forest, but the unruly way the shrubbery and thingies grew over each other was impressive, a tangled beautiful mess. It wasn't like those backyards with lawns trimmed to the owner's liking or the artificially planted evergreens at front gates. The difference between Mother Nature and the rigid ways of mankind. Damn.

I had to admit it's a tiny bit dangerous, the trees were getting denser and the shades of green above us grew dark. Tyler almost tripped once, but I grabbed his arm fast enough.

"Careful, dear."

He blushed.

Looking back, we could no longer see our bicycle. We saw a small stream of water trickling down a deep mossy trench to our right.

"Almost."

Suddenly, sunlight seemed to flood the place, blinding us for a while. Our eyes adjusted to the change and the next moment we found ourselves in a clearing, half the size of a basketball court. There was only one large tree at the centre surrounded by nothing but green grass.

Tyler gasped and advanced towards the oak tree curiously. The branches did not spread very wide and there were few leaves, but its slanted trunk was thick and had colorful lichen growing on the bark. There was a platform made of wooden planks nailed onto two low branches at my eye level, and only two walls, along with a roof. Tyler's height, basically. He wasn't very tall, but then again there was Frank.

"Whoa... You made this, Josh?"

"Wha? Haha nah I didn't, you think too highly of me, Ty. I found it recently."